LOL!! To the people saying the 5.5 is a 4.5....No 4.5 on this planet has a one handed backhand with technique that is that good. At best you could argue he's a 5.0 but the errors he made seemed uncharacteristic for him probably because he's playing a 4.5. When I was still 5.0 and played a 4.0, my goal was to beat them 0 and 0 and you end up playing a little bit worse than you should due to this mental aspect...
Nice to see what difference it makes in level. The so called 5,5 guy is clearly not really challenged by you and made mistakes by lack of interest or focus. I think he is indeed a strong 5.0 to 5.5. YOu can see that hes not putting that much effort into the game and still wins 6-1.
The best example of what you mentioned is at 40-30 in the 1st game. I hit what I thought was a pretty good serve wide to backhand and James casually hits it down to line for a return winner.
Scott honestly has a very impressive serve for a 4.5 has a pretty high percentage and gets a decent amount of free points against a much higher level opponent.
James looks like he hits a heavy ball and it is jumping off the court. That always wreaks havoc for me and throws off my timing. Solid start for him, but I think you'll adjust in the second. Guess we will see soon. Cheers.
Here in SoCal UTR 9-10's tend to dominate as upper echelon sandbag 4.5's and bump to 5.0 at the end of year if they don't throw matches. UTR 7 would generally dominate 4.0 and get bumped. Just generalities, a few obviously fall through the cracks.
